Will Forte Quotes

Mainstream's never appealed to me, really. I mean, I've become popular over the years in certain areas. But mainstream, you know, I would rather the mainstream come to me.

I'm not a mass-appeal artist.

It would be awesome to stay popular, but if I was only an underground artist, I would be okay with that.

It was really weird to have a hit. Of course, we had a certain level of fame in the Pixies, but nothing I had ever done had been mall-kid friendly.

Being shoved into the top-40 scene was an unusual experience. It was great I'd become accessible to a huge audience but not terribly fulfilling.

I don't view the fans in the way that most performers do. As a mass of people who have paid money, I know what they want. It's a very, very, very, very, very low common denominator.

And I think that we're more of an alternative act in that sense, and that flavor comes across to the audience.

I don't really set out to please anybody, and I don't think I ever have. I have occasionally been encouraged to try to write something specifically for the purpose of releasing it as a single to get radio play. Those are not my best songs, as a rule.

There is no sense in making a film that no-one will go and see, just to create a perfect, but useless, work of art.

Even the bands I dig don't have a history of attaining mass consumption.

I don't feel I'm making a conscious effort to go more commercial.

I think some people record songs and make records a certain way to cater to radio. If you're born to make commercial music that's cool. But if you're born to not make commercial records, maybe you're meant to cater to another market.

I think 'Shameless' is more of an everyman's show, whereas as great as I think 'Girls' is, it's got a smaller audience.

I've tried different things through the years to get some play on mainstream. I'll try to tailor-make it.

With 'Outlander,' definitely the book fans were at the door, ready to go, as soon as we started. But it felt like it kind of crossed over into more of a general audience rapidly. That did surprise me - I thought it would take longer for general audiences to come around.

One has to create music with mass appeal and not something which is niche. With niche music, you will only go a small distance.

I guess the bottom line is I don't make music that is consumed en masse.

The word 'cult' is almost a nice way of saying a lot of people hate you, or have never heard of you. It means someone can come up to me in the street who's really into my stuff, who's seen everything I've done, but the guy standing beside them has no idea who I am. Even in Glasgow. I think that's cult.

I don't want to focus too much on trying to write a song for radio.

I'm never trying to be commercial or accessible, or saying "let's do this weird stuff, but at the same time we gotta do this safe stuff".

There are obviously people who want to be very niche, but I think for the most part everybody is trying to reach a larger audience.

Artists dismiss me as an architect, so I'm not in their box, and architects dismiss me as an artist, so I'm not in their box.

I have made 34 pictures, 10 of them for Disney, and none of them for Disney were really bad characters. So I think that recently I have kind of begun to hide behind certain actor's devices in order to make a dividing line between what I used to do and the characters I have been asked to do today.

It's more important to have the one million diehard fans than to have 54 million people who aren't necessarily fans, or they might have liked one thing you said or one video.

I still remember most people in the industry warning me that I was not playing the stardom game and that I was becoming niche because these content films don't do big numbers.